ILLUSION

In my previous blog post, I wrote about NEWSCHOOL and the pioneering work done by Advertising & industrial Photographers Association of India (AIPA) in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1990, we in Bangalore, members of the Southern chapter of AIPA published an interesting magazine called ILLUSION. In the absence of Internet, printed images and words were the only means of reaching out. ILLUSION addressed the pressing issues of those times and was an effort to educate our colleagues and advertising and industry about commercial photography. Please do keep in mind that cameras and accessories attracted 250% customs duty when imported during those times!

There were no high end computers capable of image editing, neither was any software to edit images back then. Jasra Graphics in Mumbai had a computer capable of carrying out some corrections but it cost heaven and earth to work on it. So, commercial photographers had to achieve everything in camera. ILLUSION was designed by K V Sridhar, who was then with Enterprise Advertising. There wasn’t any DTP facility then, hence getting the design ready for print – a process that was called ‘making artwork’ was manual. Types were selected from the Letraset catalogue and were set as per the designers choice by specialist type setting outfits. It was a slow process!

Our dear friend H Jayadeva (who passed away about 2 years ago) was the editorial adviser. I was the editor. The team included Sudhir Ramachandran who was the President of AIPA, D Radhakrishnan, Clare Arni and Pankaj Shah. Cartoons were by Gujjar and Mytec Process printed the book Pro bono. Here is link to download (290MB) the pdf made from scans of the pages. Do download and share! Please note that the scans are not perfect, though the visual quality is very good.

Do let me know your thoughts!

A spread from ILLUSION. This was a photograph he made for LIPTON tea bags. There is no Photoshop here. All effects were done in camera!